ArtDubai Solo Show
Disciplines
Private Collections
I have always trusted the thread more than the word. In this new body of work, I let it lead — pulling line through surface, painting where I cannot stitch, stitching where paint falls silent. What emerges is a language I did not plan: botanical, restless, half-calligraphy and half-wilderness. I think of it as threaded silence, written wildness. The alphabet of a landscape that refuses to stay still. My hands carry an inheritance. My great-grandfather worked the Ajami rooms of Syria, laying ornament over wood with a patience I recognize in myself only now — the sacred attention a surface demands before it will speak. I did not restore his rooms. I loosened them. I let the vines climb out of the pattern and grow where they wanted. These works continue a conversation I've kept for years about women — their resilience, their quiet insistence, the way something in them keeps blooming after the storm has passed. Nature is my collaborator and my confidante; I have always been more fluent with it than with people. Each mark is a sentence in that dialogue. To bring this work to Art Dubai, in the year the fair turns twenty, is to offer that private conversation to a wider room. I am not asking to be read. I am asking you to listen the way one listens to a garden — slowly, without needing every word. — Lana Khayat
A Gift to the City I came to Dubai carrying two landscapes inside me — the Mediterranean I was born to, and the desert that took me in. This city asked nothing of me and gave me room to grow anyway. So it feels right to leave something of mine here, rooted, where others can stand in front of it long after the fair has folded away. "My Gift to This City" is my offering to Dubai: not a farewell, but a thank-you. A field that keeps blooming after I've gone quiet.
I have always made work about women who endure, about the things that grow back after the storm — and I can think of no truer place to plant that idea than a city built on the same stubborn hope. Consider it threaded silence, left in the open. A conversation I'm handing to the city, to continue in my absence. — Lana Khayat
Building on the direction of her critically acclaimed 2025 solo exhibition at Hafez Gallery in Riyadh, The White Lilies of Marrakech: Women as Timeless Narratives, Khayat arrives in Dubai with work that continues her long meditation on resilience, femininity and the relationship between language and landscape. Here, botanical forms unfurl against fields of abstraction; calligraphic gestures dissolve into growth. What survives a storm, the work asks, and what quietly insists on blooming after it.   The threads are not incidental. Khayat traces her artistic lineage to her great-grandfather, Mohamad Suleiman Khayat, a master craftsman of traditional Syrian Ajami rooms — a heritage of ornament, patience and the sacred surface. In her hands that inheritance is loosened and rewilded: threaded silence, written wildness, a conversation with nature carried out beyond the reach of human script.
"My art is a dialogue between worlds," says Khayat. "A bridge where nature, heritage and abstraction converge to celebrate the strength and resilience of women. This presentation at Art Dubai is an important moment to bring this conversation to an international audience."
"My art is a dialogue between worlds," says Khayat. "A bridge where nature, heritage and abstraction converge to celebrate the strength and resilience of women. This presentation at Art Dubai is an important moment to bring this conversation to an international audience."
For commissions, collaborations, or collector inquiries, I'm always open to meaningful exchange.